Holy Spirit in Western Traditio
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Edinburgh Research Explorer The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Western Theological Tradition Citation for published version: Schumacher, L 2016, 'The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Western Theological Tradition: Underdeveloped or Misunderstood?', Heythrop Journal, vol. 57, no. 6, pp. 999-1009. https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12301 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1111/heyj.12301 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Heythrop Journal Publisher Rights Statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Schumacher, L. (2016). The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Western Theological Tradition: Underdeveloped or Misunderstood?. Heythrop Journal., which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/heyj.12301/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. 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ABSTRACT: In contemporary theological discourse, the Western doctrine of the Trinity, as articulated by figures like Thomas Aquinas, is often criticized on the grounds that it presupposes an underdeveloped theology of the Holy Spirit that denies the third person of the Trinity the fullness of divine personhood. This paper will show that the standard critiques of the Western doctrine of the Holy Spirit spring from a misapprehension of the term ‘person’ as it has traditionally been used to refer to the divine persons. By elucidating the nature of divine personhood in the course of interpreting Aquinas’ thought on the Trinity, the paper will throw into relief the full personhood of the Holy Spirit. On this basis, moreover, it will ultimately aim to demonstrate the unfounded nature of some of the other main critiques of Western Trinitarian doctrine. 1 In contemporary theological discourse, the Western doctrine of the Trinity, as articulated by figures like Augustine and Aquinas, is often criticized on the grounds that it entails an underdeveloped theology of the Holy Spirit that denies the third person of the Trinity the fullness of divine personhood that is enjoyed by the other two Persons.1 With regard to the inner life of God, or the so-called ‘immanent Trinity’, for instance, many have argued that the Latin doctrine fails adequately to distinguish the Spirit’s work from that of the other two Persons of the Godhead.2 By construing the third Person of the Trinity as the bond between those two persons, this doctrine supposedly treats him as the mere means through which they co- operate and thus fails to recognize his status as a divine person in his own right. When it comes to treating the ‘economic Trinity’, or the Incarnate Son’s revelation of the Triune God, moreover, scholars have observed that the Latin doctrine seems to absorb the identity of the Spirit into that of the Second Person of the Trinity, through whom the work of the Father is accomplished on earth. The purpose of this paper is to establish that such common criticisms of the Western doctrine of the Holy Spirit spring from a misapprehension of the term ‘person’ as it has traditionally been used to refer to the divine persons. By elucidating the nature of divine personhood in the course of interpreting Aquinas’ thought on the Trinity, the paper will throw into relief the full personhood of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, moreover, it will provide a basis for demonstrating the unfounded nature of some of the other main critiques of Western Trinitarian doctrine, which will be shown to apply more accurately to the alternative renderings of the Trinity that have been formulated by its critics. By way of context, the present discussion can be helpfully framed with reference to Karl Rahner’s magisterial work on The Trinity, which initiated a revival of interest in Trinitarian theology in our time. In this work, Rahner assesses how Trinitarian theology has been affected by the modern rise of a concept of personhood that diverged quite significantly from preceding philosophical and theological tradition.3 This tradition had been dominated by Boethius’ definition of the person as an ‘individual substance of a rational nature’ (naturæ rationalis individua substantia).4 Although this definition certainly allows for personal distinctiveness, it nonetheless emphasizes that individual human beings are ultimately part of a larger class of beings that share in common the rational nature, which involves both an intellect that knows and a will that motivates the intellect to pursue knowledge. Thus, Boethius’ definition implies that human beings are social creatures that properly cultivate their individual rational capacities in the context of a community, which nevertheless does not limit or define their personalities, as I will show further below. Already, this definition found competition in the high middle ages with the introduction of Richard of St Victor’s idea of a person as an ‘incommunicable substance of a rational nature’.5 This notion of personhood laid greater emphasis on the irreducible individuality of human beings. In modern thought, that emphasis came to the fore in ways that quickly gave rise to an individualistic ideal of persons as a discrete centres of consciousness or wholly autonomous entities.6 As Rahner rightly recognized, such an ideal tends to generate tri-theism when it is projected, if inadvertently, onto the doctrine of the Trinity, in which there is and can only be one centre of consciousness, one substance, or one essence.7 In response to this threat to the unity of God, Karl Barth among others have argued in favour of discarding the 2 language of divine personhood and have opted instead to explain the doctrine of the Trinity in other terms, which seemingly promise to render the notion of a divine person more intelligible under modern circumstances.8 Thus, Barth famously referred to the Persons in terms of three ‘modes of subsisting’, namely, ‘Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness’.9 This bold move of course invited charges of modalism or sabellianism, that is, the unorthodox belief that the three Persons are really just modes or aspects of one divine being, which have no distinctness in themselves. Although these charges on the part of Jürgen Moltmann, for example, do not seem entirely fair in that they tend to overlook the nuances of Barth’s position, nevertheless, they reveal the difficulties involved in accounting for the unity-in-distinctness of the three Persons when modern notions of personhood are at play.10 In this context, the only alternatives that immediately present themselves are tri-theism and modalism. Yet these are false alternatives that can and arguably must be transcended by the formulation of a more adequate conception of divine personhood. To this end, Rahner, by contrast to his earlier contemporary Barth, sought to preserve the idea of divine persons, first by defending it against misunderstandings, and especially by invoking more contextually relevant terminology to elucidate and interpret it for those to whom it might seem foreign.11 In this regard, Rahner admits that he is largely motivated by a desire to honor the Catholic magisterium’s moratorium on changes in the language that had long been employed to articulate the doctrine of the Triune God. In that sense, the reader cannot help but wonder whether he might simply have abandoned talk of divine personhood if he, like the Protestant Barth, had not been constrained by Roman authority. A Thomistic Conception of Divine Personhood Where Barth and Rahner found ways to re-cast the traditional idea of divine persons and a broadly Western tradition of Trinitarian thinking more generally, I will endeavour in what follows to rehabilitate it. To this end, I will interpret Aquinas’ account of divine personhood in the wider context of his Trinitarian thought. At the outset of this discussion, it bears acknowledging that the doctrine of the Trinity that Aquinas presents in his magisterial Summa Theologiae has recently become the subject of a significant controversy, instigated by none other than Karl Rahner.12 According to Rahner, Aquinas was the first major theologian to divide his discussion of the one God (de Deo uno) from his subsequent account of the Triune God (de Deo trino), although he admits there is some precedent in this regard in the work of Augustine.13 In Rahner’s view, this division is problematic because it implies that Christianity is effectively a monotheist religion in which the doctrine of the Trinity constitutes a mere afterthought.14 As part of a wider effort to demonstrate the doctrine’s relevance to Christian faith and life, Rahner takes great pains—as Barth did in his own way—to establish the connection between the economy of salvation in Christ, that is, the Incarnation, and the inner life of the Triune God. Thus, he famously formulated his rule, according to which, ‘the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity’.15 The upshot of this rule is that knowledge of the Trinity 3 cannot be obtained by human beings apart from the Incarnation of Christ, even if it is attainable this way by God.